Hi,
I did a night flight over the Canadian Rockies from CYYC (Calgary) to CYGE (Golden).
Not thinking about it, I failed to check if the destination airport had runway lighting (SkyVector says no: skyvector -> /airport/CYGE/Golden-Airport)
This brings up a few important questions.
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Some airports in real life have transceiver that allows activation of runway lights (PCL/PAL/ARCAL) - does MSFS have this capability yet? (see wikipedia Pilot-controlled_lighting)
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Other airports require communication with control to activate lights - is this possible in MSFS?
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If an airport is not equipped with runway lighting, or the lighting is inoperable, will control advise me? Is my only way to determine this to check something like SkyVector? Can I not just ask control?
If its consistent with real life, it would be nice to have a message warning me “Cessna QRF7A, Golden Tower, be advised runway edge lights on 33L are inoperable/not available, advise XXX”
If I’ve made any invalid assumptions, please don’t hesitate to point out my ignorance.
UPDATE: For the software engineers in the crowd, I recognize the possible complexity in implementation here; so this is more so just so I can plan my flights. Shared state of the game world make even simple features hard, i.e. persisting runway lighting state across many nodes, TTL, yadda yadda.